Thank you to AmenMoses for his fantastic coding skills, this is the result of 2 weeks work
This level as also been saved as standalone unfortunately it was made with the latest beta so i cannot share it until its PP.

I will pass all the assets across to Lee for inclusion in the next build

As I said in the other thread, the one crucial thing missing from these effects is different blending modes. Right now the particles are relying entirely on the alpha channel alone, so many of them have noticeable black outlines. But, and anyone who is familiar with Photoshop will know where I'm coming from here, adding in modes like 'add', 'screen', and 'multiple' would really help the blending and take these effects from this (hastily mocked up example):

To this:

I suspect this functionality lies within the shaders, not in LUA, but it would be cool to select the shader used for a particular effect using a LUA command

Avenging Eagle this was not done in haste we spent a couple of weeks refining yes it could be better it also could of been worse for a first attempt I think it is a step in the right direction please don't forget this as been done with stock shaders once the particle shader is complete I will look at my sprites again and see where to improve there are a myriad of settings in the lua code that Amenmoses has done one of them being alpha so this level was created to show what is possible now it is not something to compete with in AAA titles that being said I have done a lot of research and our particle display is as good as what most titles have. And for the record I have used 3 blending types 'add' 'normal and 'subtract' most of the particles were created by hand and I tested 3 different compression formats please bear in mind these are a first attempt the video above was just to show where we are up to at the moment

@GraPhiX (&AmenMoses); don't get me wrong, I think it's fantastic what you two have done so far, I wasn't trying to cause offence or belittle your achievements and I'm sorry if my comments came across that way. I just wanted to offer some constructive feedback on how this amazing addition to Game Guru could be made even better

Quote: "I think AE was saying his photoshop example was hastily mocked up not the work you guys are doing "

Oh yeah, totally, mine was thrown together in After Effects in a few minutes. Again, wasn't trying to belittle OP's work, which has obviously taken weeks. Sadly, I wouldn't have the first clue about writing HLSL shaders, I can barely grapple with LUA, but that's not the point.

AmenMoses: Yes that looks correct , but in additive blending Alpha is black , and the alpha channel is not used , so to fade out you need to fade the colors to black. and your particle textures need to use black instead of alpha.

I made a little sample , and will include the additive particle texture i use , so you can test it

I will post my particle anyway if somebody else could use it, this particle is the only one used in this video.

Remember: to use additive blending the best way, you should pack more particle in the same area , that is what give that "shine" effect when the blending is going on, all the particle colors (behind the current) are added up to give the final color to the shader.

The reptilian from the fantasy pack , with a little additive blending particle effect added to its weapon:

AmenMoses: You cant use the old particle textures , but converting them to black as alpha is worth it.
Avenging Eagle: Thanks for suggesting additive blending

Preben, what other blending modes are out there? I ask because, as well as additive, I find the mode commonly known in Photoshop / After Effects as 'Multiply' (i.e. white = totally transparent, black = opaque) very useful for certain smoke effects. Would you call that 'Subtractive' blending?

@ GraPhiX
that last video is truly amazing .
makes me want to go light a big fire in the garden.
bet lee is sitting with a big smile on his face at the moment.
perhaps some fire for his dragon coming up.

So if you used SUBTRACT then white would get darker and more transparent.
https://docs.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/desktop/api/d3d11/ne-d3d11-d3d11_blend_op

You can also set SrcBlend,DestBlend where Src is what you return from the shader , and Dest is the current pixel in the render target, you have these options:
https://docs.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/desktop/api/d3d11/ne-d3d11-d3d11_blend

When its a .fx file you just remove the "D3D11_BLEND_" from the options and insert the rest like "SrcBlend = ONE;".

So there are tons of combinations , the best way is to just try different settings until you find something that looks amazing

Unfortunately I had a hard drive issue a couple of weeks ago and lost it amongst other things
I managed to get the piano and other stuff back but I don't have the fireworks standalone anymore
Please post it for anyone that would like to have it including myself lol

I've tried the level and it is really great, performance wise it is also not very demanding it seems, apart from the wall with the circles during which the frame count drops to 40 until it is finished.

There still seems to be question of stacking new data on top of old data which is not cleared from the memory after closing and going back to the main menu and restarting the same level again.
I wonder if i should make a report of it or if it is simply impossible reuse the data already present in the memory.

Also there is a huge frame drop when the player is close to the fence, it looks like the old collision bug but i thought that this was solved so i'm wondering if the collision is set to 1 instead of 0 for the fence.

Attachments

thank you for trying it, yeah it was just a quick level thrown together in September or October, I was just learning about particles at the time no optimisation was done on the level I only made the standalone to make sure the LUA and particles copied over.
Since that was made i have learned better techniques for the particles and created new explosion effects i will eventually release the firework models and scripts so yo can have a play